Evolution can be a tricky business for musicians. For every Radiohead, there are scads of artists who wandered too far away from the tastes and attention spans of their fans, only to wander back and find everybody gone. At the highest pop-success level, where "evolution" generally means a wardrobe/lifestyle change or the addition of a power ballad to the set list, the smallest deviations are often praised as daring. But for underground, cult and niche acts that depend on obsessive followings and word-of-mouth promotion, the reaction to stylistic shift can mean the difference between going on tour and going broke.
Of course, the smaller, more loyal throngs are also the ones that might accept anything their favorite group does as gospel. And a big change might mean new fans that didn't care for the old shit. Then again, there's always the risk of alienating old fans while failing to turn on new ones.
See? It can be a pain in the ass.
But early on, German electronic-music duo Funkstorung found an admirable way to render all of the above rigmarole irrelevant: They made evolution their trademark, change their standard.
"It was a very important point that we don't have any rules. From the beginning, we've done what we've wanted to do," says Michael Fakesch, one half of the genre-smashing production/remix/songwriting team. "We never listened when people said you couldn't combine this with that, can't use a synthesizer that way. That's the best part about electronic music."
Fakesch and partner Chris De Luca's early work in the mid-'90s has been described as fairly straightforward techno, but was inventive and iconoclastic enough to attract supporters of more visionary stuff like Aphex Twin and Massive Attack. In any case, the pair quickly moved into more eclectic territory, collaborating with myriad eclectic artists and incorporating elements of everything from hip-hop to the American laptop/glitch-hop scene to chopped-up funk and industrial sounds. Fans quickly became acclimated to the idea that what they heard next might well be very, very different from what they heard last. The pair's critically acclaimed 2000 release Appetite for Discstruction set new standards for IDM (Intelligent Dance Music, a term Fakesch says he used to like but now dismisses as another pigeonhole), and the brand-new Disconnected heads off in yet another completely new direction.
"I think they expect us to try new things. That's what we did on [Disconnected] as well," Fakesch says. "We've worked with so many people from different genres. People kind of expected this new style."
One of the most striking things about the killer Disconnected — beyond its intensely headphone-friendly stereo-panning techniques and moody, layered sound — is its accessibility. Vocals are a new wrinkle for Funkstorung, and they're all over the disc, most notably in the form of male singer Enik's vaguely Seal-esque existential musings and MC Tes' clean, compressed flow. The incorporation of lyrics (along with an ever-wider assortment of traditional instruments) brought out the songwriters, as opposed to the programmers, in Fakesch and De Luca, creating a strong argument for the philosophy that, no matter what medium in which one works, it eventually comes back around to just wanting to pen a good tune.
"Definitely. That's what we thought when we started doing this album. We wanted to do songwriting, not track writing," agrees Fakesch. "It makes sense to work that way. It makes the music much more interesting, and more exciting, I'd say."
He says that the concept of adding vocals to Funkstorung's noise came out of the band's remix work with Bjork. The young men are constantly in demand as a remix team (they've done countless sessions, including work for Wu-Tang Clan and Lamb), and often, ideas and experiments they try on the music of others find their way into the process of making their own records.
"I would say we definitely learn a lot from doing remixes. When we did Bjork … before, we weren't sure if vocals would fit our music, so we tried it on her remix, and it was so great," says Fakesch. "We discovered it was our future."
Funkstorung's current tour reflects that increasingly organic approach to songcraft, and moves it to the stage. While the project isn't exactly touring as a full band, they've got a live bassist and vocalist augmenting the electronics. Fakesch confirms that they won't be completely ignoring past material, but it's the first time the group has hit the road in the States as anything other than a duo.
"[Fans are] definitely surprised, but not negatively," he says. We're getting very good responses."
Though they've recorded two new songs since completing Disconnected, and there's a DVD release on the horizon, Fakesch can't see what's coming after the current cycle of promotion for the new album. He'd rather not speculate, either. After all, it was four years between the last disc and this one — hectic remix/collaboration schedule notwithstanding, naturally — and the difference between the two releases is staggering. Another lengthy evolutionary stride can almost certainly be expected, however, and if Fakesch and De Luca's current listening habits are any indication, an even more organic, genre-stomping effort may be on the horizon.
"We're really more into rock music right now. Fuck, have you heard them, the band Fuck, like the curse? It's really cool rock music. Chris is really into that stuff," Fakesch says. "What I really get into is Jimi Hendrix. It's not just electronic music we're listening to now. [Electronic music is] limiting itself, and that's what I don't like."
Contact Scott Harrell at 813-739-4856, or scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2004.